Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
For those wanting something stronger in the morning,
http://brewpi.com
discusses a Raspberry Pi-based
solution for controlling the temperature of a home brewery!
Clock Radio
If tea (or an early morning beer!) is not to your taste, then the Raspberry Pi makes a very advanced clock radio. Such a
project is a suitable starter into the world of self-penned home automation, as it needs very simple software, and can
suffice with a very basic display.
Instead of using an actual radio, there's no reason why it can't stream music from your local media server, or
read the news from the RSS feeds, or your schedule, or any of the other ideas presented in Chapter 7. As a bonus, and
unlike most clock radios of their day, it can also adjust itself for daylight savings. It this happens, however, it should
always issue feedback to say that it has changed the time, because (as we've learned) every action should have a
feedback message, and we don't want to update the time twice.
Without Mains Power
Moving away from the benefits of small and cheap, one can utilize the Raspberry Pi's ability to be powered by battery
to use it in locations that might be considered dangerous or illegal to have mains power.
4
For example, a shed, shower,
kitchen, or garden, where the introduction of water or steam could have an adverse affect on mains powered devices.
This allows you to build your own garden robot to feed and water the plants at specific intervals and, without any
additional effort, report the results back through a web page. The keyword here is “interval” because computers, even the
Raspberry Pi, are high-power devices so permanently running it from batteries is going to ensure a short-lived robot.
For example, the Adafruit power pack (
http://www.adafruit.com/products/962
) lasts around 5 hours, while a basic
AA battery pack (
http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2013/02/running-a-raspberry-pi-from-6-aa-batteries
)
can last over 16 hours.
One of the biggest drains on battery power (other than a screen) is WiFi connectivity. Because you wouldn't want
to forgo a power cable, only to find yourself tethered by a network cable, it's best to store all the data locally, and write
an rsync script to offload the data periodically to another machine, such as a laptop.
Installation
The Raspberry Pi, as supplied, is capable of doing nothing. Indeed, the board as supplied needs both additional
hardware and software before it comes as smart as a brick. Let us now look at those steps.
Software
As with a traditional Linux system, the first step is to choose a distribution. The Raspberry Pi occupies an interesting
place here, since while some traditional distros (like Debian) have versions of their offerings available, many others
have shied away. The community, at large, has adopted an interesting approach of treating distributions as if they
were applications - if you want to use the Raspberry Pi as a media centre, then use a pre-installed media centre distro
such as XBMC
5
or OpenElec.
6
If you want thin client, then use RPTC.
7
And so on.
-ANY
JURISDICTIONSHAVEAMINIMUMDISTANCEFORPOWERSOCKETSTOTAPSFOREXAMPLE
http://www.raspbmc.com
http://www.openelec.tv
http://rpitc.blogspot.se
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